


Reorienting

by Palebluedot



Category: Black Sails
Genre: 4.10 Spoilers, Bittersweet, Canon Compliant, Forehead Touching, Happy Ending, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Pillow Talk, Post-Series, Reunions, Tenderness, a CANON COMPLIANT HAPPY ENDING, a soft epilogue, i sacrificed two meals sleep and my gpa to write this, thank you black sails thank you thank you thank you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-04
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 20:04:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10543580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Palebluedot/pseuds/Palebluedot
Summary: Thomas grabs ahold of his holy apparition with both hands and keeps him there, draws him nearer. Let them hold each other until they both bruise, he thinks fiercely, for tenderness needn't always step light. Love owes them kind wounds.





	

He does not want to hate the sugarcane. It has done nothing wrong, and sways beautifully in the wind, like seaweed trapped between waves. Yet hate it he starts to. His hands fumble and jerk back bleeding, and still the stalks stand placid, unmoved. Were it hostile, stretching roots out to trip him, he could forgive – he is, after all, charged with cutting it to the nub – but the indifference rubs him slowly raw. This will never end. Thomas watches his world narrow to the width of a furrow, and the landscape to which he must sacrifice his labor, his _life_ , would not know it if he disappeared.

The cane surrounds him like the grass of the Fields of Asphodel, looms too tall, threatens to consume him. If he doesn't find a reason to make it grow, he'll wither to nothing.

Nails edged dark with earth, he thinks of red hair, of saber-clash debates, days whiled away in whispers and hopes and caresses that vanished the world. He thinks of his wife, and her strength, and imagines what she would tell him he must do to survive. The seeds must go into the ground. Each one he plants for them. He can find no ill will for what grows from these memories, however cruelly transplanted they may be. The cane grows. The cane falls. The cane cuts him. He remembers, and starts again.

~+~+~+~+~+~

Hands, hands everywhere, his hair, his neck, molding cresting imprints in the back of his shirt. Thomas remembers when those hands were timid things, frozen to marble for so many heartbeats before settling below his shoulders, two sparrows. Had James believed Thomas would shatter if mishandled they would not have held him gentler. Now they clutch at him as though he'll turn to wind should they relent – they are risen from the dead, too. Thomas grabs ahold of his holy apparition with both hands and keeps him there, draws him nearer. Let them hold each other until they both bruise, he thinks fiercely, for tenderness needn't always step light. Love owes them kind wounds.

Thomas presses their foreheads together once more, cradles James's head between his palms. He pauses. For the dozens, hundreds of times he's held such a pose, something is strange. At last, he opens his eyes. “You cut your hair,” he whispers, and James, who is here, James, who is holding him, James, who is crying, laughs.

One of his hands wanders, cups Thomas's jaw, thumb stroking through his beard. “This is new,” James chokes, still lost between laughter and tears. Thomas turns his head and kisses his palm, lingers there long, then longer, takes the hand in his own. Their fingers weave together, muscle memory. James lowers their joined hands and noses forwards, and his soft lips sear. Between their chests, their knuckles crush. Thomas pushes ever closer, drowning, desperate, delivered, and the bones of James's hand dig into his skin in the place where his heart pounds.

On, and on, and on. Their shadows shift, but there they stand, twin vines entwined, until James's ragged breath has long steadied against the crook of Thomas's neck, until Thomas can bear to unbury his nose from a shirt that still smells of the sea.

~+~+~+~+~+~

The dread name of Captain Flint wreaks one last miracle.

Thomas knows he cannot reach for James's hand when they walk through the gates. It almost doesn't matter. Beneath their feet, the path calls, and it does not sound like siren song, or the ticking of a clock. It sounds like their footsteps, real and true and rhythmic. Like rainfall. Like breath.

They walk into town, and the air blows sweet against Thomas's face, so far from the sweat and the dust. Nobody knows them, or asks where their gold comes from, what queer fortune has befallen them to impart that look in their eyes.

The room they rent is quiet. The lock clicks behind them and they are free.

~+~+~+~+~+~ 

During his first harvest, a young man with dark hair and haunted eyes lost control of his machete while stripping leaves and caught Thomas across the chest. It bled and it bled, and Thomas watched his life soak into the soil below his feet and disappear. As the months wound on, he found himself with a scar that nearly matches the one beneath his fingertips now, though contemplating the wound that made it cannot turn his stomach the way the thought of a blade and the sea drinking James's blood does.

His touch ghosts across the puckered knot on James's shoulder, and he flinches as though the pistol shot has fired past his ear. A gentle grip at his wrist steadies him, calloused thumb tracing and retracing the same lines, once, twice, more, and Thomas realizes James has found the remains of the taloned scrap of fencing that snagged and tore open his forearm a year ago. How carelessly the years have tossed them both about. A pair of scarecrows they've become, stuck fast.

James's eyes darken as they pass more fully over the scar on Thomas's chest, two blue tempests in the flickering candlelight. His hands press against the jagged slash, as if to hide it, or heal it with a prayer. “I would have stopped this,” he says, wavering, urgent, “if I had known.”

“I know,” Thomas murmurs, though it hurts, because it's true. He cannot look at James's patchwork chest any longer, so he lifts his gaze. It doesn't help. Behind James's eyes, he sees shades so much darker than splintering ships and flashing steel. His voice breaks. “So would I.”

James says nothing, just squeezes his eyes shut and leans forward so that his temple rests on Thomas's cheek, his hands still braced on his chest. Thomas raises his hands to bracket broad shoulders, skims them along James's back, tries not to count the ridges and hollows they find. At Thomas's neck, warm breath huffs. A soft nuzzle, then hesitant lips brush against his pulse, then grow bolder, and make him sigh. Thomas's hands curl at the nape of a sun-darkened neck, and he forgets to catalog the scars James's touch roams blindly over. They cling to each other, and their lost decade does not fall silent, but stills, lets them pass over it and pay no toll.

No matter how battered, flesh is flesh. Though some of theirs is gnarled and haunted, it all shudders the same beneath their wandering lips, their rough-weathered hands.

~+~+~+~+~+~

Humid air, heavy eyelids, warm fingers carding through his hair – Thomas forgot long ago that such peace existed. He peppers kisses aimless as freckles across James's shoulder, and feels it when he hums, contented.

Thomas smiles against James's skin. “Do you remember our first night together?”

James opens one eye, crinkles his brow. “What do you think?” he asks, lip curling, and Thomas laughs low.

“Your hands shook,” he tells him, fond, reaching down to tangle their fingers. He finds them trembling, and they close over his so tight they almost make a fist. “They're shaking now,” he says, squeezing back as best he can. “What's wrong?” 

James stares at the ceiling for long moments. When he finally turns to Thomas, the depths to his eyes are terrible. “It burned.” 

“What did?”

“Everything,” James shrugs, lost. “I anticipated the _Walrus_ might not survive, but I never believed they would reach our home.” A home. Thomas cannot picture the place, but he knows, he thinks, how Miranda might have laid out the furniture. “The books, the portrait, even her fucking teacups – ” James winces, then blinks, and when his eyes cut to Thomas, he knows they see him at last. “Everything from before has turned to ash.”

“James, my love,” Thomas sighs, and the hand still tangled in his hair stiffens. They will both, Thomas supposes, cease being surprised by affection one day. “It was only paper and porcelain. They were never destined to outlast the ages.” James nods, but his fingers still grip like a drowning man's. Thomas soothes them with his thumb, gentle pressure he's longed after for ten bitter years. Time and fire – their worst was not enough. “Besides,” he says, with effort, lightly, “the flames didn't take everything.” 

“No.” James smiles, a soft, sad thing. “But they could have.” And Thomas, for all his heart aches, cannot tell him this isn't true. Dream-slow, he raises himself so that they are eye to eye, then forehead to forehead, sharing the same breath. Finally, then, they are close enough, for something in James collapses. “When they killed you, they killed me just the same.”

Thomas knows this is no lie. He has learned too deeply what it is to be unmade. But they have labored too long, too broken, for the story to end so pitifully. "Yet here we are,” he says simply. “How lucky we must be.” The tips of their noses brush. When James's breath catches, Thomas nudges closer, and James meets him halfway.

“Have I ever told you,” James asks at last, small, as though the words themselves cause him fear, “about the time I sailed into the heart of a storm?”

Of course he hasn't.

“No,” says Thomas. “Would you?”

Of course he will.

James tells sailing stories for the rest of the night, eyes staring into the distant dark, as though he's reading some great novel from memory. Some are old, well-polished, already told to the sugarcane, others are new and terrifying and already drifting like silk beneath the waves. Thomas sleeps with his head tucked on a familiar shoulder, phantom sea spray blowing in his hair, an arm that is somehow solid, somehow real, holding him fast. 

He wakes to a soft bed, an impossible future, and a kiss. Tomorrow, he will do the same. Morning after morning, muted gray dawns and radiant sunrises both, he opens his eyes to find he is not alone, until the last uncertainty drifts away on the breeze that lilts through their open window. Not a dream, then. Arms close around him, and Thomas lets his eyes drift shut, for neither of them need wake with the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> I began mentally drafting this weeks ago as insane wish fulfillment. It's been two days and I still cannot believe what happened. Wishing you all a similarly joyous post-finale dreamwalk, I know I'm still reeling in the best way, and I hope you are, too. 
> 
> Comments are love!


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